AN INTRODUCTION TO SAUL BELLOW (10 June 1915 - 5 April 2005)

Dr. Gloria L. Cronin
Brigham Young University

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Saul Bellow's status in the post-WW II period of American literature can only be compared to that of Hemingway or Faulkner in the earlier part of the century. Nobel Laureate (1976) and winner of numerous awards, Bellow has commanded serious critical attention for more than 45 years. By now, he is undoubtedly one of the most written-about fiction writers of the contemporary American period. Since the 1950 scholars have produced over 30 published volumes and over 1,500 scholarly essays attest to his importance. Such interest hinges largely on the fact that no other post-WW II American writer has analyzed so completely and so humanely the effects of American cultural anxiety with the age of technology and rationalism, existentialism, and the legacy of high modernism. Scorning absurdism, nihilism, alienation ethics, and belief in Deus Abscondus, refuting historicist pessimism, preaching against the void, and defending the embattled masculine self of Western metaphysics, Bellow has affirmed Judeo-Christian religious and social values more strongly perhaps than any other twentieth-century writer. From within this space he has tried to restore the integrity of feeling, the meaning of ordinary existence, and the primacy of social contract to a society in which he perceives these things to be in eclipse. Likewise, few writers have explored so thoroughly and humorously the high comedy of heterosexual relations in our age, or the multiple, defeating "masculinities" to which the American male is heir. That he has failed to deal adequately with "femininity" and people of color is a commonplace of recent Bellow criticism and cannot be ignored. However, it is the complexity of this failure which he shares with so many other male writers that should interest us.

As Bellow entered the decade of the 1940s as a young writer and intellectual, he realized that it was a Hemingwayesque model of masculinity with its hardboiled, understated, existential stoicism that dominated the values and the masculine voice in American literary culture. His decision to write against the grain of this modernist formula has enabled him to stage an entirely different male voice and set of values. As he said of his own writing: ". . . I am going against the stream. That's not an attitude. Attitudes are foolishness. It's just that there's no use doing anything else is there? I blame myself for not having gone hard enough against it, and if I live I shall go harder." It is the dominant mood of later modernist despair that Bellow wanted to go hard against, with its impersonal, stoic masculine voice, Apocalyptic romanticism, a destructive Faustian individualism, cultural elitism, existentialism, alienation ethics, absurdism, nihilism, aloofness, and apocalyptic fears of the collapse of Western Civilization are cultural ideas Bellow has consistently and vehemently opposed. Above all, he has decried the destruction of the unitary Romantic self which produced in American fiction a defeated wastelander who laments the failure of society and the human experience. This late romantic despair Bellow believes to have filtered down as a legacy from Joyce, Mann, Proust, and Lawrence, causing twentieth-century writers to cultivate a particular sensitivity to banality and ugliness:

There are modern novelists who take all this for granted as fully proven and implicit in the human condition and who complain as steadily as they write, viewing modern life with a bitterness to which they themselves have not established clear title, and it is this unearned bitterness that I speak of. What is truly curious about it is that often the writer automatically scorns contemporary life. He bottles its stinks artistically. But seemingly he does not need to study it. It is enough for him that it does not allow his sensibilities to thrive, that it starves his instincts for nobility or for spiritual qualities.

What he derides here is the preoccupation of modern writers with "the teeth that are crooked, the soiled underclothes, and the clerk with the carbuncles." The preoccupation with a kind of "conventional unearned wretchedness about existence is mere fashion," he argues. Speaking rather sadly about this legacy of pessimism, Bellow complains of the subsequent tone of elegy which infected the "master" works of modernism:

. . . modern literature was dominated by a tone of elegy from the twenties to the fifties, the atmosphere of Eliot in the "Wasteland" and that of Joyce in A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man. Sensibility absorbed this sadness, this view of the artist as the only contemporary link with an age of gold, forced to watch the sewage flowing into the Thames, every aspect of modern civilization doing violence to his (artist-patrician) feelings. This went much further than it should have been allowed to go. It descended to absurdities, of which I think we have had enough.

This elegiac tone of modern literature, according to Bellow, portrays twentieth-century life as divisive and fragmented. Its celebrants claim that the fragmentation and disorder are finally too great to be overcome, that the novel itself is dead. Such proponents, Bellow complains, draw elaborate, ugly pictures of the breakdown of society, mass culture, and the centerlessness and splintering of individual consciousness, without ever questioning the truthfulness of this view. They have lost their faith in "man" and can only portray him as an impotent victim of overwhelming forces which are beyond his beyond his ability to comprehend or control.

Bellow attributes this modern despair to the historicist premises that lie at the base of most modern novels, and which premises emerge in American literature as the sense that history has reached a terminal point, that ". . . America is a fraud, that all is blackness, bitterness, and hopelessness." This is simplistic and merely rationalistic, says Bellow: We find this terminal assumption in writers like Joyce, Celine, (accent) Thomas Mann. In Doktor Faustus, politics and art are joined in the destruction of civilization. Now here is an idea, founded in some of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. How good is this idea? Frightful things have happened, but is the apocalyptic interpretation true? The terminations did not fully terminate. Civilization is still here. The prophecies have not been born out. Novelists are wrong to put an interpretation of history at the base of artistic creation--to speak "the last word." It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life.

Bellow's witty response is heartening and accounts for the persistent appeal his fiction has had for nearly fifty years: "I don't see that we need to call for the destruction of the world in hope of a phoenix. If I am not a romantic, it is for this reason. I've a nagging sense that the human situation is not as described by these late romantic writers. I may be disappointed in existence—but I feel I have a right to demand something other than romantic disappointment." After all, romantic sensibility, he says:

. . . has always had its satirists to mock it. Thomas Love Peacock was one of the first. Dostoevski made marvelous fun of the exquisite romantic personality in a novel like The Possessed. But on the whole, the modern movement in literature represents a victory for wretchedness, and even in the recent "absurd" plays and novels, there is more metaphysical despair than laughter. . . . Let us hope that superfluity and solemn nonsense having been laughed and hooted away by the comic spirit, we may see the return of real moral seriousness in literature. . . . Free public education has given the power of expression and a new understanding (in that order) to the grandsons and granddaughters of laboring illiterates. It has made them able to deplore their civilized condition. A mighty and universal spirit of grievance, long in abeyance, is uttering its first words, releasing what was perhaps to have been expected--the cry that the world is an oppressor, and that existence is absurd. In this situation, the comic spirit of reason opposes the popular orgy of wretchedness in modern literature.

As early as 1944, Bellow questions the failure of faith in the contemporary novel. In the Times Literary Supplement of July 1960 he comments: "disappointment with its human material is built into the contemporary novel." In 1966, he told the Montreal Star that the American novel is "filled with complaints over the misfortunes of the Sovereign Self."

Furthermore, he argues, two whole generations of university professors were raised, and raised their students to view Joyce, Mann, Proust, Eliot, and Lawrence as the last literary prophets or models. Now, says Bellow, misguided novelists feel they have to adopt the early modern "waste land view" of man (Bellow's term) and experience in order to be considered intellectually respectable. The task of such writers, according to Bellow, is to seek for the truth about human nature and not to try to apply inherited or agreed-upon historical estimates of man. In an attempt to break the power of rationalistic and scientific estimates of man, which seem to hold sway over the modern imagination, Bellow finally that there are avenues into which technology cannot lead us. These are the avenues of the imagination which he believes to be an organ of truth superior to modern intelligence and likely to provide us with truer estimates of human experience than the rational formulations of the physical and social scientists.

The worst casualty of all this, he says, is the attack on the value of the individual's inner life: "The private and inner life which was the subject of serious books until very recently now begins to have an antique and funny look. The earnestness of a Proust towards himself would seem old-fashioned today. . . . Writers may not agree with the Bertrand Russell reader that "I" is no more than a grammatical expression, but they do consider certain claims of the "I" to be definitely funny. Already in the nineteenth century Stendahl became bored with the persistent I-I-I and denounced it in characteristic terms." Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1963, Bellow roundly castigates Valery, Lawrence, and Joyce for originating a picture of a "divided unstable self" full of "nihilistic passions" which bred ultimately in the novel "a demand for experimental radicalism." He also laments the highly cerebral and amorphous creatures that now pass for heroes in the novel: "The Person, the character as we knew him in the plays of Sophocles or Shakespeare, in Cervantes, Fielding, and Balzac, has gone from us. . . . A Cubistic, Bergsonian, uncertain, eternal, mortal someone who shuts and opens like a concertina and makes strange music," now appears.

The blame for much of this is the American university and its writers-in-residence programs, where writer-professors teach students that the great moderns like Lawrence and Joyce were the last literary prophets or models, and that any who would become future writers must adopt this early modernist "wasteland" stance in order to be intellectually respectable. Hence, he argues, "The main current of cultural criticism in the twentieth century has run without much change for fifty years. Few people question this modernist orthodoxy. This orthodoxy rules English Departments, which have become the Paris substitutes of the young literary men." The task of such writers, he insists, is to seek for the truth about human nature instead of applying inherited, already agreed-upon estimates of man. Avoiding this colonizing of the human spirit and imagination preoccupies nearly all his characters.

Speaking with Jim Henry of The Listener, he declared his belief that such gloomy intellectual fashion would not "kill the virtues." His own optimism he attributes to early Tolstoyan influences which resulted in his unshaken conviction that individuals can always find some kind of inner balance, or find out the contents of their own and other hearts through listening to ". . . an inner voice . . . that keeps [them] performing certain duties, that makes [them] recognize certain human obligations, that restrains [them] from the commission of certain crimes. People know certain things, they know them very well. They know their duties to children in a sort of natural way. . . don't think that these things are very easily eradicated by any fashion."

Because of Bellow's consistent preoccupation with these themes in interviews, essays, and fiction, the critical conversation has focused on them also. From the earliest responses to some of the most recent, the vast majority of critical readings have described Bellow and his male protagonists as defenders of an embattled Western humanist tradition, enemies alike of nihilists, rationalists and other touters of the void. These critical narratives speak of Bellow the anti-modernist who clings romantically, even archaically, to notions about human transcendence, and beliefs in the universality of a unitary Self. That is to say, critics have located him firmly within the nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses of continental philosophy. This philosophical narrative has been so powerful and compelling it has all but foreclosed other interpretive conversations. Critics are yet to examine the ideology inherent in Bellow's notion of the seamlessly unified, universal, non-gendered image of the bourgeoise Self. Assuming that art and commentary are not neutral relay stations, but function to circulate the embeddedness of culture and its many contingencies, then Bellow's highly intelligent texts have much to tell us about the state of being a particular kind of human being: male or female, American or European, black or white, jewish or protestant, old or young, than has previously been thought. Such issues of "otherness" play a complex and as yet unexamined role in his fictional worlds.

In particular, Bellow's fiction registers a uniquely twentieth-century American masculinist anxiety through his numerous male protagonists who sense intuitively the conflicting ironies and imperatives of their own engendering. While feminist critics might well hold Bellow responsible for failing to create fully-imagined women, he makes no bones about the fact that he is primarily interested in men, and particularly in the "man" of poetic sensibility and mantic awareness. In fact, much of Bellow's brilliant comedy erupts from the narcissistic nature of these male characters whom Bellow both loves and chastises for their shortcomings. Neither is their creator blind to their homosociality, hostility to women, and failure to encounter the qualities of femininity they obsessively seek and rarely find. Given this focus, it should not surprise us that while many women characters appear in his novels, relatively few are given voice, and most are constructed along very stereotypical lines. Only two, Hattie in "The Yellow House" and Clara Velde in A Theft, function as a central protagonists in more than forty-five years worth of fiction. The majority of the novels are told in the first-person as monologues, and rarely allow any other view of the worlds described. Those novels and short stories which use third-person omniscient point-of-view, also report the interior thoughts and emotions of a principal male protagonist, whose inner dialogue functions much the same way as the first-person monologues. Furthermore, the novels usually construct an implied male reader, or narratee. This narrative construction, which automatically focuses the reader on masculine dilemmas and sensibility, nearly always eclipses the female voice, and ultimately creates within itself the narrative conditions of a misogynous collusion of men against women. Invariably women readers find themselves having to identify with the male protagonists, who assume a male audience, and collude with them in the condemnation of the women characters. Failing this, they must remain outside the text, alienated from this colony of embattled men.

Clearly, this apparatus of looks converging on the female character constitutes the primary scopic drive in Bellow novel. The male protagonists are the only figures in the landscape who are free to command the stage of spatial illusion; hence, the endless fantasy of pursuit, capture, desire, memory, and loss which constitute the male experience in novel, after short story, after novella. For the brief period of the reading experience, male readers enact the fantasy of love, hate, possession, loss, and finally mourning, which starts all over again in the next text. These are texts that fictionally construct the narcissistic male gaze by inviting male readers into the text, often for spectator sport at the expense of women. Consequently, "Woman" not women, becomes the object of the combined gaze of both male author and male reader. It is a gaze split between a passive female who is looked at and an active male who looks. Because of this dynamic between looked at and looker, that difference which is "feminine" is almost always precluded. The masculine erotics which operates here decenters the "feminine" subject, "Woman," who, within this textual economy, cannot escape the designations imposed by language. For all the complexity with which "masculinity" imagines itself in the Bellow text, it could be argued that it still imagines itself poorly, and thus erases "femininity" in what amounts to a double movement of loss.

The net result of the privileging the narratorial voice of the male sensibility and the production of an implied male reader or listener is to create a male homosocial collusion. Bellow's male protagonists have long been labeled egocentric, narcissistic, and self-indulgent. Now critics have added "misogynous" to the list. As we enter nearly all of these fictions, we are in a world populated primarily by men, and comprising almost entirely of male social interractions. Men who just happen to occupy all the major roles, while women function on the sidelines, if at all, in minor and often destructive roles. They are nearly always described in terms of their utility to the male enterprise, and are most frequently treated with suspicion and hostility. Increasingly, in the novels of Bellow's middle and later period, the damaged and/or contaminated male protagonist enacts a celibate, monastic retreat from the sexually chaotic and destructive influence of "Woman," to retake the masculine domain of thought and values.

While this may sound like a harsh feminist dismissal, in fact it is not. Bellow is clearly aware of much of his construction of gender in these novels, and frequently leads his male protagonists into some interesting gender deconstructions, as they examine their own egocentrism and buffoonery. In characters like Mr. Sammler, Kenneth Trachtenberg, and Benn Crader, Bellow is clearly examining the nature of misogyny, its social origins, behavioral dimensions, and subsequent tragi-comedy. Perhaps he has done more than most contemporary writers to examine the farcical and not-so-farcical failures of heterosexual relationship in our era. The functional and non-functional "masculinites" Bellow's heroes struggle under he explores in terms of their particular historical, cultural, and ethnic trajectories. Neither should it be forgotten that all of these characters are comic constructions whose inanities teach us to laugh about our own. Bellow's exploration into issues of gender is far more subtle, sophisticated, and amusing than that of most other male authors, despite his significant blindspots. His account of masculinity in hypermasculine, protestant, capitalist America, for all that it is impoverished by his own misogyny, is, nevertheless, richly taxonomic of post-WW II American culture. The Bellow text simultaneously enacts traditional gender ideologies, protests them, exploits their comic dimensions, explores their intellectual and social origins, deconstructs them, and stages numerous male quests for renewed relation to an elusive "femininity" which nearly always defies capture. If Bellow's fiction enacts a circumscribed kind of moral and ethical brilliance, its depth is still impressive.

Born in Lachine, Montreal, Canada on June 10, 1915, Saul Bellow was the fourth child of Abraham Bellow and Lescha (Liza) Bellow, both of whom had immigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia in 1913. Thus, Saul Bellow is a first-generation American Jew, offspring of that vast European migration of more than 2 million people to North American between 1880 and 1925. Abraham Bellow, Saul's father, was a produce importer in St. Petersburg, until he got into trouble with the authorities and left to live with his two sisters in Montreal. Saul Bellow was his mother's youngest son, and Lescha Bellow wanted him to be a Talmudist. Family members report that, by the age of four, he had memorized large passages of the Old Testament and was doing precociously well at Hebrew lessons. In 1923, when only eight years old, he suffered a bout with tuberculosis, during which he spent many months in a hospital ward. Bellow describes himself as becoming something of a dreamer, isolated within his own family and afraid their scorn of the emotional and imaginative world he had built for himself. In 1924, the family left Lachine, Montreal for the tenements of Humboldts Park, Chicago, the environment that would shape so much of his early fiction. Chicago in the 1920's boasted a population of approximately 125,000 Jews. Saul Bellow attended Lafayette School, Columbus Elementary School, and Sabin Junior High. However, his rich and interesting neighborhood life suffered a major blow in 1924 with the death of his mother. This event, coupled with an early bout with tuberculosis, left him permanently scarred with a fear of death. There is little information about these intervening years, but Miller reports that Bellow graduated from Tuley High School on Chicago's North West Side in 1933, and that in the fall of that year entered the University of Chicago. In 1935, he transferred to Northwestern University where he studied anthropology under the famous Melville J. Herskovits. He graduated with his B.A. and Honors in Sociology from Northwestern University in 1937 and went to New York. The plan was to study at New York University; however, he returned at Christmas and shortly thereafter married his first wife, Anita Goshkin. The young couple moved into his mother-in-law's flat in Ravenswood, where Bellow began to work on the manuscript of Dangling Man on a bridge table in the back room. By 1938 he was in Chicago working on the WPA project, while during 1939 he supported himself with teaching, odd jobs, and work on the Index (Synopticon of the Great Books series. He taught at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers' College and otherwise lead a bohemian existence. In 1940 he was called up for military service and entered Maritime Camp at Sheepshead Bay. "Two Morning Monologues," and "The Mexican General" appeared in print in 1942. By 1944, the year Dangling Man was published, Bellow's first son, Gregory, was born. By 1945, he was living on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights, writing book reviews, and reading manuscripts for the newly-formed Penguin Books. He was also hard at work on The Victim. He taught at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis from 1946-48, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948. From 1948-50, he wrote and worked in Paris, traveled in Europe, and began work on The Adventures of Augie March. Various segments from it were published in magazines. In 1949 he published two more short stories, "Dora" and "Sermon By Dr. Pep," while in 1950 "The Trip to Galena" appeared. In 1950 he returned to the USA and lived in New York City and Duchess County, New York. He taught evening courses at New York University, in Washington Square, reviewed books, wrote articles, and worked on his fiction. The following year, 1951, he published more short fiction-- "Looking For Mr. Green," "By the Rock Wall," and "Address by Gooley McDowell to the Hasbeen's Club of Chicago.

In 1952, he received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award and was made Creative Writing Fellow at Princeton University. In 1954 "Leaving the Yellow House" appeared, and with it Bellow received a Ford Foundation grant. In 1959 Henderson the Rain King was published and Bellow, who had just left his wife, embarked on a lecture tour of Poland, West Germany and other European countries to recuperate from yet another marital catastrophe. In 1956, he married Alexandra Tsachacbasov, his second wife, and was divorced by 1960. Adam, Bellow's second son, was born of this marriage. By 1961 Bellow had married Susan Alexandra Glassman, his third wife, and received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Northwestern University in 1962. Bellow's third son, Daniel, was born to this marriage. This same year, he joined the prestigious Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was also working on an early draft of his play, "The Last Analysis." He returned to Chicago in the fall of 1963 after having been made Honorary Doctor of Letters by Bard College. When his most ambitious book, Herzog, was published in 1964, Bellow received the James L. Dow Award, the Fomentor Award, and the National Book Award. However, when his play, "The Last Analysis," opened on Broadway that same year, it failed miserably and closed after only two weeks. In 1965 Bellow continued to garnish honors for Herzog. He also received the International Prize and published a revised form of The Last Analysis. By 1967 he had published "The Old System," and made a trip to Israel to report on the Six Day War for Newsday Magazine, then published by Bill Moyers. Later in 1967, he accepted a position at the University of Chicago and returned from New York to furnished rooms in South Chicago. The following year, 1968, his first short story collection Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories, appeared. That same year, he divorced Susan Glassman, he won both the French Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, as well as an award from B' Nai Brith. By 1969, an early version of Mr. Sammler's Planet appeared, and by 1970 it was published in book form. This was the year of his famous walk-out at San Francisco State College, after he had been booed and catcalled off the stage by rowdy student radicals and an unprotesting faculty. Nevertheless, honors continued to follow him and, in 1971, he won the National Book Award for Mr. Sammler's Planet, despite the dubious response of many critics and reviewers. Again, it was a year of triumph and failure. His play, The Last Analysis, was performed this time at an Off-Broadway theater, and closed after after five weeks.

During the decade of the seventies he also published "Zetland: By a Character Witness" (1974), "Burdens of a Lone Survivor" (1974), and Humboldt's Gift (1975). This was also the year he married Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. It seemed, after the rather bitter Mr. Sammler's Planet, that Bellow had recovered his comic spirit. He had also met and read the influential anthroposophist, Owen Barfield, whose ideas find their way, in transmuted form, into several of the subsequent novels. However, 1976 proved to be another year of success and failure. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and published the rather unsuccessful To Jersualem and Back: A Personal Account, after covering the Six Day War as a journalist for Newsweek. It was also in this year he visited Bucharest with his wife, Alexandra, and began work on The Dean's December. In 1978, he published "A Silver Dish.

Bellow continued to publish steadily through the 1980's. By 1984 his next collection of short stories, Him With His Foot in His Mouth, appeared. In 1987 More Die of Heartbreak, appeared to be followed in 1989 by both A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection. It all Adds Up, Bellow's collected essays appeared in 1994 and The Actual appeared in 1997. Scholars also hope that during this decade, a definitive biography on Bellow will be published. Until then, it will be difficult to construct a reliable biographical narrative. However, from the very beginning, Bellow's novels construct their own picture of their author, his origins, and preoccupations.

Bellow's has been a long and honor-strewn career that is far from over. With rumors of a two more major novels reaching completion and numerous short works still to be published, final assessments and premature conclusions are inappropriate. But Bellow has already secured one of the major reputations in post-WW II American letters.

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